Google Search Console: The Toolbox of Webmasters

I’m a great follower of Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). Almost every day, I use to spend some time with this free Google tool simply because of its vast usefulness in managing/administering a website mainly from a digital marketer’s point of view.

By profession, I’m a digital marketer turned self-proclaimed webmaster with over a decade of experience in SEO, PPC, social media, etc., and still gaining knowledge every day.

In today’s post, I’m going to share with you all my relationship with Search Console as a fan of SEO (which is an essential part of all kinds of digital marketing activities). I’ll tell you the story of the webmaster’s life – my likes and dislikes about Search Console in addition to define some traits, suggestions for the Google Webmaster team, and predictions on upcoming changes to Search Console.

Statutory Warning: I haven’t had a chance to set up and then check Search Console data for any mobile app to date! So my entire write-up is on the website only. Though I have theoretical knowledge about using Search Console for mobile app, however, I feel, it’s safe to stick to websites only for now based on my practical experience.

Benefits of Google Search Console

Here are the top ten bits of help as a webmaster I use to get from Search Console –

• Finding and fixing security issues with the website’s content
• Removing errors that occurred when the website was crawled by Google’s both “Desktop-bot” and “Mobile: Smartphone-bot”
• Eliminating the site speed related issues by analyzing the crawl stats like time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)
• Debugging usability issues detected by Googlebot for mobile site
• Addressing issues with structured data and rich cards implementation on top of considering suggestions from Google crawler on HTML improvements
• Troubleshooting issues with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) implementation on the site
• Reducing issues with site’s user experience and performance by analyzing “Search Analytics” data
• Maintaining a search-friendly JavaScript-powered website or a complex e-commerce website
• Adjusting all the other technical SEO related concerns as seen by Google’s web crawling bot and report back through the Search Console interface
• Building a robust web presence by analyzing “Links to Your Site” data

Kindly note, depending on the nature of a user of Search Console, the usage may change and importance can vary time-to-time.

How to use Google Search Console?

This is my earnest request especially to the novice webmasters like me around the globe; please don’t devalue the actual worth of Google Search Console data. Invest some of your precious time to explore the opportunities you can see inside the tool reported by Google’s web spiders. And appeal to the experienced professionals, if you’re not exploring, then, you should start reviewing all the reported issues within the Search Console time-to-time immediately and consider fixing each of them very carefully.

Although there are many webmaster tools (both free and paid – one of them is Bing Webmaster Tools – its FREE to use – which is one of my favorite tools for my website optimization projects) available on the web for anyone’s use, however, Google Search Console is the most elegant one till date to me at least. And I’m saying you this not from any bias inside me. Clearly, Google is the leader in search engine technology till now (both for mobile and desktop even though both Apple’s SIRI and Microsoft’s CORTANA have a strong presence). So knowingly or unknowingly, you’re playing the SEO game to great extent as per Google’s playing rule or game plan.

Google Search Console Information

The Search Console is a platform which developed, maintained, and updated by Google. The main purpose of this tool is to provide the website owners valuable feedback about their site’s overall health condition and configuration issues. When the Google bots start crawling a website and indexing the web pages, they usually check for whether the asset (or presentation of content) is in compliance with Google’s set of rules and regulations (read algorithms) or not. Accordingly, they accumulate all the information and display it to the site owner for consideration through the Search Console interface. All the data that we’re seeing inside Search Console are the comprehensive analysis done by Googlebots – so it’s how Googlebot interpreting the web property (an entire website or set of web pages) – the insights (computation based on search algorithm) from search engine’s point of view.

Here, one thing is important to remember, search engines like Google, Bing is no more just senseless programs, they become smart, intelligent, and trying to sense the intent of each search happening through them on the web to match everyone’s expectation.

This is true that Google is not obliged to provide all the crawling information they collected to the site owners. However, to me, the amount of data they are currently sharing with the website owners are not sufficient especially if the site owner is serious (or curious enough) about his/her web-mastering role.

I believe, Google also knows that there is huge room for improvement in terms of helping the webmasters fixing the bugs within the site easily. And that’s the basic reason why they have developed Search Console (earlier Webmaster Tools) and maintaining it proactively. Not only that, Google is encouraging all the webmasters universally in every way for using their tool – their newly built Search Console interface (beta version) now is accessible to all in parallel to the old existing version. In fact, the more people start following Search Console directions or suggestions, the fewer Googlebots have trouble crawling and indexing accurately the web down the line.

Not only crawling issues or technical things, as a webmaster, but you can also figure out a lot of non-technical and marketing insights as well by doing Search Console data analysis regularly. Since the importance (and also acceptance of the tool in general) of Search Console so high, thus Google is also bringing up new Search Console features now and then. I’m anticipating that Google will invest more effort in Search Console’s up-gradation in the future. As a matter of fact, I feel, they’re actively trying to establish the Search Console platform as an intermediator between Google and the website optimizers and/or owners. And not only websites, but I also guess, soon the world will start getting more definitive tips for mobile app optimization through Search Console.

With the growing usage of the internet and the advancement of technologies like AI, VR, and ML, this is expected that the demand for professional webmasters will also grow inevitably. And as a result, the acceptance and regular use of Search Console’s feature-sets will also expand in near future. The more people start interacting with Search Console data-sets, the more they’ll become aware of how Google search engine works, the more they’ll take precautionary steps before designing and developing new websites and mobile apps, the more they’ll think practically how Google wish to see your assets on the web for the sake of your website’s success (to reach out to your targeted audience with your content). As a result, the less trouble a site owner faces later, the fewer technical obstacles will be arising for the webmasters, the easier it to optimize the site for digital marketers, the fewer headaches need to take by Googlebots and every stakeholder of this ecosystem work more efficiently.

It’s not very difficult to imagine, running the whole show (crawling, indexing, and then return results on the search results page against each search query) by Google needs humongous effort in terms of manpower, time, and money. We’re living in an era where leveraging the power of automation is very common in any manual process. The concept of IoT (Internet of Things) is now well known. Machines are becoming more and more independent of operation. So Google is also spreading out a signal, please help us understand your web properties (say, website and/or mobile app) so we can able to serve you better in terms of providing accurate search results.

Look, the common goal for both Google and any webmaster/website owner is the same to great extent – serve the user in a better way so they really get engaged with the content. Here content means anything that is helping us interacting with our audience – may it be text, may it be an image, or video, or any other form. So, the basics should be very clear to everybody – people are spending time on the web, so if I want to reach out to that audience, I should have at least a running website where I can portray my messages to them, now if I have a website, it’s my (as a website owner) responsibility to help Google find the easiest way to consume the content, the better Google digest our content, the accurate search results Google will able to provide, the more accuracy in search results means a happy searcher which may lead to a happy user or customer for your website. That means you are happy to put more effort into the web to build it better. So see, everyone is happy. It’s a chain reaction. It’s a duty for everybody to help out each other optimally so we can build a better web not for others but for our own survival.

Google Search Console Features

I’m using actively Google Search Console for quite a while now. I’ve seen the revolution and evolution of the platform as a user, as an outsider (not a Google insider by any means), as a novice marketer, as an experienced webmaster, as a geek, as a nerd who likes to learn about new tools and embrace technologies, etc., etc. I’ve witnessed many changes inside the Search Console over the time and I keep adjusting-re-adjusting my operational activities on and around this tool often. After all, change is the only constant thing if you are seriously thinking about truly digitize your work.

One thing I must admit that not all the changes implemented on to the Search Console platform till now by Google have given me an equal level of positive excitement or pleasure. So needless to say, during the course, I liked some changes to the Search Console very much, and on the other hand, I didn’t like some. But that’s fine. Nevertheless, the overall utility of the tool in a webmaster’s peaceful life is tremendous and growing faster. So I accept all the challenges that have been thrown to me (not personally obviously) by the Google Search Console team. You should too keep continuing with customizing your actions to survive online for many more years to come.

Most (if not all) of the professional webmasters already know the features and functionalities of Google Search Console very well. For that, thanks to the entire Google’s official help articles, forum discussions, personal blogs, news journals, and individual contributors from different parts of the world.

Please note, I’m not enforcing anyone to agree with my thoughts about how I see the Google Search Console features and what functionalities I would like to see in that tool in the coming days? Based on my own understanding, I’m sharing some predictions here about the upcoming changes to my favorite Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) which may or may not happen.

I know, that Google has a big team of data analysts, developers, designers, user behavior analysts, user experience analysts, data scientists, user interface designers, etc., etc. and they are a bunch of really intelligent people. They put a lot of effort and the end product is in front of us – the current GWT platform – renamed Google Search Console (GSC). I also can imagine that before making any changes to the interface, they have measured and calculated a lot of things as a service provider. But that doesn’t mean every change they made is full proof. Not to forget, in the end, they’re human and can miscalculate too.

Anyways, one particular thing I would like to use here is an illustration of my unhappiness with GSC. For example, inside the Search Console feature, there is a Dashboard – you may consider it as a starting point especially for beginners.

On the Dashboard, there are four highlighted sections currently available. These are –

• Latest message to you from the Search Console team
• Current status of crawl errors
• Current status of search analytics
• Current status of sitemaps

Suggestion (on Search Console)

Nowadays, we the webmasters worldwide are working hard for proper AMP implementation as Accelerated Mobile Pages is one of those latest developments by Google which has tremendous importance on the web. So, I would like to see some AMP data on to the Dashboard (in the old interface as many like me are still using the old version). No matter, whether you’ve applied AMP on your website or not, the situation is, the Sitemaps section is still appearing on the Dashboard even when not used by us, then why not AMP? I believe, importance wise showing the AMP status snapshot is equally very important.

Prediction (on Search Console)

Google team is thinking about accommodating the AMP chart on Dashboard (in the old version) as it is gaining huge importance and will definitely allot a space for AMP onto the Dashboard screen within the next 12 months.

Google Search Console and Search Engine Optimization

To me, Search Console is the question bank where you can get most of the answers (data analysis and testing) that are useful to build and optimize Google-friendly websites.

Here are some of the things you can do once you add your website –

• Analyze click data to determine your users’ behavior on Google search
• Get alerts from Google in your email inbox directly for critical errors or emergency issues
• Leverage features available inside Search Console to ensure your website is in compliance with Google search engine

I’m sure many of you’ve to find Search Console useful in many more ways – the data available there, are food for your thoughts and make you productive too in terms of providing actionable suggestions to run a website. And unless we keep updating our knowledge with how Google search algorithm works time-to-time, our website’s health issues reported in Search Console will constantly be there. Not to forget, there is some hint (on how to tackle ethically any website-related issue reported by Google in Search Console) given for maintaining a website for webmasters.

If you are wondering, how to be aligned with Google’s search technology? Then I’m telling you, there is no one magic formula!

Following practical tips shared by team Google on their official blogs and social media channels, will help you to understand how Google search works and take necessary precautions. The benefits of reviewing Google’s own support/help articles aside from other forums/blogs/articles will help you find your custom methods of solving a problem. Those valuable advice/hints will inspire you to take action. All you have to remain curious enough to run your website effectively.

Each of those content pieces contains insight (some are definite and some are indefinite) that can help us to become successful webmasters. But that doesn’t mean we should completely rely on the internet all the time. Sometimes away from our screens will help us find the best way to solve a problem or following sheer gut feeling. Anyways that’s a different story.

Great websites are the combination of smart thinking and hard work of website owners. Be the owner of a website nowadays is not big news anymore. In fact, many of you are now owners of multiple websites. But a few years ago, it was a bit tricky. Even today, managing a website (no matter how small it is) properly, requires adequate time and sense. This is why Google has decided to let the website owners spend time optimally on building the most useful website for their users, while Google takes care of the rest – i.e., helping users find that website. Obviously, the medium for all (website owner + Google + user) will be the content in a different form.

Many website owners/entrepreneurs still think they don’t have to worry much about how Google search works. But then that’s not an example of smart thinking. Even if you work hard on creating content, knowing at least the basics about how bots are working (discovers, crawls, indexes, and understands that content) on direct users to relevant website pages is essential. You may not know all the technical details (an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, etc.), but that’s fine – for that you can always contact a freelancer or hire a professional.

Are there special activities you are doing that others should try that would help a website get the most out of search? Please let all know in the comments.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of my post. I know, only time can answer how realistic are my predictions (and thoughts) which I shared in this blog? They may or may not be considered by Google’s team; they may or may not be regarded as serious thoughts, even though, I’m feeling happy to share my honest outlook about the Google Search Console.

See you again!

NB: I'm a soccer fan and FIFA World Cup 2018 is going on. So all the images/memes I've used in my post dedicated to the fantastic event happening in Russia.